The Frenzy of Agauë
by Maenad1
Summary: When the family business is the care of werewolves, accidents are bound to occur.


He shouldn't have been down there, of course, but catacombs hold an endless fascination for a small boy. Not that they were real catacombs; they weren't even called that. Reams of carefully preserved family correspondence revealed, if one was inclined to read it, that four centuries of wits had nicknamed it variously The Den, The Lair, Moon Hall, The Pit, The Vault, The Tooth and Claw Party, Lycaon's Bed Chamber, and other such weak puns and allusions, but it did well enough, with a bit of imagination. A solemn, subterranean hallway of heavy stone, with iron doors on either side opening into dank, windowless cells, fifty all told, old swords and spears and a musket or two, respectively reforged with silver blades and loaded with silver bullets, Muggle weapons from centuries gone by, arrayed at shoulder height between the doors all the way down the passage; no light but the torches and his own shaky candle, no sound but the howls.

It was the Registry that did in the family business. In 1947, a party of do-gooders had kicked up a fuss, placards and banners and scenes at the Ministry and all, and had the Werewolf Code of Conduct amended for the first time since its enactment. Provided he was registered and could demonstrate to Ministry officials that he possessed in his lodgings an adequate 'safe room' to be used on the full moons, a werewolf could walk free, liberated from the asylums that had contained them since it had been first deemed inhumane to hunt them down and destroy them. They'd tried the same trick with vampires two years later with far less success; once a month society might accept the risk, every night called for barred doors and iron collars.

So the inmates had dispersed, for the most part, though Lupin House was a pleasant establishment, as such things went: the sheets in the dormitories were clean, the food was plentiful, the gardens behind the towering bars of the gate were open to all from sunrise to sunset, books and music were encouraged, visitors allowed and the private rooms the wealthier families sometimes paid for on behalf of their afflicted kin were as airy and agreeable as the suites in their own manors. But, as they say, a prison with velvet curtains is still a prison, and the lycanthropes went in droves to try their luck against prejudice and mistrust in the general population. Only the eldest stayed: sexagenarians with no kith or kin left to go back to, no idea how to survive on their own and little enough time left to learn it in; even pureblood wizard werewolves rarely saw seventy. With the patients went government funding in one jubilant sweep of the bureaucratic glove called 'cost cutting,' and the proprietors of the institutions, deprived of their trade, had slipped into an irreversible decline.

For a time many of the wolves had returned at the full moon, to rent a secure cell for the evening, and on this uncertain income the Lupin family had subsisted for some time, but even that had ceased in recent years, and of the long row of cells past which the boy crept, tonight only three were occupied, and these by old prisoners, anomalously long lived for their kind, who regarded any attempt to dislodge them as more of an eviction than an emancipation.

None of them seemed particularly terrifying to him; old, tottery creatures who lectured him for speaking out of turn and sometimes pulled lollies from their pockets to give him, as if he were a favoured grandchild instead of a keeper. When the number of inmates was reduced to five, his parents had given up serving the wolves' meals in a separate room, and seated them all together around the family table, which was a more convenient arrangement, and more importantly a cheaper one, if not quite proper, and rather than let them stand empty all were given private rooms, regardless of whether they could afford them.

They sat about together, the three of them, and complained in the crotchety way of the aged about modern times, and longed for the good old days. And after all it was an ignoble thing, this aristocratic poverty. Patched robes and marble pillars, never quite enough to eat, wands that sparked and books that fell to bits in the hands. A tremendous house that could barely squeeze itself onto the tiny plot of land that was all that was left of the grounds. All the rest had been sold off in parcels, and for far less than it was worth: nobody quite liked to live on earth where werewolf paws had walked. If it hadn't deserved its evil reputation then, it did now: those who would purchase the land were beggars, or else those with an interest in the dark arts, and the ramshackle cottages clustered around the old asylum building like serf hovels around a feudal estate. Even the house itself belonged more to the Gringotts goblins than it did to the family.

Which wasn't to say that he understood all that, even a precocious child has little interest in finances: only that the grown ups were worried, and talked in hushed voices, or else spelled to prevent him from understanding. Which was silly; he could spell all right, but he didn't always know the meaning of the words, except that they always seemed to be about money. He couldn't go outside, either; not by himself, and certainly not off with the other children, whose parents were probably doing unspeakable things with Unforgivable Curses in their cellars, and it would be years before he could go away to school, so adventures were more confined than he would like, and there was never anyone to help him plot them.

This was a good one, though, at least theoretically, though he suspected there wouldn't be very much to see. He'd been down there before, innumerable times; seen the doors and the bars and the weapons for precautions, heard all the old stories of escapes and riots and wolf packs on the rampage on the staircase, but he'd never come down on a full moon, when he was supposed to be up in his room, with his door locked and the silver pendant around his neck.

They'd all hobbled down hours ago; no one bothered to supervise it anymore; it was hardly as if any of them possessed a deep desire to stay loose and chew up the furniture. Three elderly werewolves, getting creaky in the joints and impossibly ancient in dog years, liable to keel over from a heart attack at any transformation, or bleed to death in the night from the wounds they gave themselves in the frenzy, trotting with the habit of a mutt going to his kennel down to those dismal cells, shutting the door and locking it from within; the locks on the outside were deemed superfluous, since the weight of the doors themselves seemed beyond the strength of any of the trio, even just pulled to; and then to wait for the moon to rise.

If there was nothing to see, at least there was plenty to hear. A werewolf alone will kick up a fuss, with nothing to hunt and no one to play with, and they could hear each other, too, and each egged its comrades on, barking and howling and pacing in circles, all tearing at their own legs and tails from boredom, occasionally testing the doors and scratching at the floor.

An eerie enough escapade to be proud of, even if one of the old wolves seemed to wheeze more than he howled, and the scrabbling was more fretful than fierce. At sunrise he could scamper back to his room, jubilant at having spent a night at the doorstep of peril, and smugly secure that his parents would never guess. There was no one to see him. Well- old Uncle Marcus might come down, but _he_ wouldn't tell. He wasn't really an uncle; a great-great-great-grandfather, more like, who'd had his throat torn out by an inmate back in the 1850s, sometime, and hung around to haunt his attacker until his dying day, and for a while after that. You could still see the marks: long, jagged scars on his translucent flesh, but his high Victorian shirt collar covered them from sight, except on Halloween.

Ghosts were common in these sorts of facilities; hospitals, asylums, prisons, any place where the deaths were frequent and occasionally horrible. They had a few here, not as many as at St Mungo's, where they sometimes had trouble displacing the dead for the living in the beds, but there were a handful of old wolves up in the attic, some of them so mad and embittered that they'd charge any human who approached them, jaws snapping, and go straight through. That was another place to explore, though he'd have to wait a few years, until he had a wand of his own and knew the spell to unlock doors.

With exaggerated caution, Remus Lupin crept further down the hallway, passing shadowy doorway after shadowy doorway. It was almost as good as a crypt, though it lacked the bones. One could imagine something-- something less mundane than a werewolf-- peering at you from behind the half closed doors of those tiny cells. Mummies, cursed to rise up from the grave, like the old Egyptian wizards used to make them do, malevolent ghosts who _weren't_ mad, the kind who promised to teach you to shoot a bow or play a fiddle, if you could keep them amused enough not to kill you until dawn, if a ghost could really kill, some reclusive old necromancer at work, seeking methods of prolonging life, who'd take on a lonely wizard boy as an apprentice and teach him to make skeletons dance, a haggard hunter of vampires taking refuge in a forgotten den, with stories to tell that chilled the blood to the point that no blood drinker would touch it, for fear of hurting its teeth. A dozen fantasies that could be contrived from dim light and iron and all too familiar howls, to while away the days that arcane books too old for his years and battered and often broken toys could no longer fill.

The wolves got louder, nearly frantic, snarling and whining and scraping all at once, as if someone was holding meat just out of their reach. Probably because they could smell him. Werewolves only bit humans. No, that wasn't right, they might hunt down a rabbit or a deer for sport, like any other wolf, but if they did they never ate them, and their hearts weren't really in it. It was people they were after, to make more of their kind, though half the time they got over excited and killed the victim instead of infecting him. He knew all about werewolves; it was family tradition, though it wouldn't matter much to him, as he couldn't be a wolf keeper when he grew up. Knew how to care for them and how to kill them, the sorts of injuries they got and the things that were poisonous to them; most importantly that they didn't like silver or monkshood, and he rather wished he'd brought some of both, even though they couldn't get out.

In the end, he chose a cell of his own, somewhere to hide himself from direct sight if he should drift off in the night and miss his chance to escape before his parents came down to help the wolves back up the stairs, and settled down in a corner with his cheek resting against the wall and his candle resting on his knees, to listen to the erratic thumps of one of the werewolves flinging itself against the door, and the encouraging howls of the other two, until his eyelids drooped in spite of themselves and he fell into a half doze of excitement and nightmare, confused daydreams mingled with reality, and a vague unease he couldn't define.

Theoretically, the doors were immovable. Solid iron, and heavily locked, and the wolves were supposed to test them when they shut themselves in. But they were getting rusty, these days. About ten were so corroded that they were beyond use, and the hinges were getting weak on all of them. Besides, though she'd set her shoulder to it with all her might, elderly Miss Yorke wasn't half so strong in her human shape as she was as a wolf, and that discounting the added motivation of the scent of Boy. Three hours of effort and bruises passed before the door began to give, but give it did, with a creak and a groan and a loud _crash_ as it swung crazily open against the wall. Then she was free.

She knew what she wanted; the odour of her prey was everywhere. It was a mad impulse, half bloodlust, half a maternal instinct to breed. If Agauë Yorke, walking upright but for her cane, had had the olfactory powers of a canine, she might now have recognised the drowsy scent of her keepers' son as a dog grows familiar to the smell of its master's friends; furthermore if she had been in her right mind she might have refrained from attacking him. Neither being the case, the werewolf hurtled out of its enclosure, howling its triumph, then padded on grizzled paws along the criss-crossing lines of scent, hours old but undisturbed, where the quarry had sought its den.

Remus woke when the door gave way. The sound penetrated a nightmare without dispelling it, so that he wasn't quite certain, upon opening his eyes, that it wasn't the Questing Beast he had read about, with its belly full of hounds, that was pursuing him. Wakefulness and instinct soon disillusioned him, and his hand fumbled futilely at his throat for the silver pendant that was sitting discarded in a foolish act of bravado on his bedside table.

He had to keep quiet. That was what his father had said, and the books and old journals agreed. If tracked by a werewolf one kept as quiet as one could, and as still, with one's wand or a silver knife at the ready, or, failing that, any old knife would do, but a werewolf stabbed with steel, even through the heart, would die slowly, writhing and bleeding out its rage, too strong and obstinate for an easy demise, and could do terrible damage even in its final throes; silver was as good as a quick poison, certain and relatively humane.

What one did when one was huddled in a cell with the weapons outside, arrayed high above one's head, beyond the easy reach of childish arms, and the wolf stalking outside, none of the books deigned to say. Presumably, one died.

Quiet was easy; he wasn't even breathing at present, fear had winded him as effectively as a blow to the chest, and he couldn't decide whether the fact that his candle had gone out was a blessing or a curse. Light was a giveaway, but fire and hot wax were weapons, after a fashion. But there had to be something else to do, some last minute escape, but he could think of nothing but to yell _"Mum!"_ and even if that would have worked his throat had seized up from fear and want of air.

Then there was a snarling in the doorway and a shadowy bulk that transformed at a bound to a palpable fury, and his hands were lifted to shield throat and face and despite his breathlessness a childish shriek filled the air.

Marcus raised the alarm. Everyone was inured to screams; if the household was on its feet every time somebody wailed in agony in the darkness they would all have been chronic insomniacs and no doubt delusional years ago; between the pangs of transformation and the nightmares to which werewolves were prone, nights could be tremendously clamorous. So they slept on, and only the ghost heard, bent over an antique chess set in the library, the pieces of which complained incessantly about being commanded by a general who couldn't even keep himself alive, let alone one who was, for his amusement, playing both sides.

If he had been corporeal, the startled jerk of his hand might have sent the whining knights and bishops flying across the room to fight out their black and white differences on the less well defined library floor. As it was the ghost's fingers merely passed through several helms as Marcus Lupin rose and strode out of the room a foot above the floor, bellowing for all his non existent lungs were worth: "Sextus! Charlotte! The wolves are loose!"

Those in the dingy master bedroom greeted his hollers at first with sleepy irritation and then, as the ghost loomed over the bed and his warning was repeated clearly enough for the meaning of the words to become evident, with alarm and a frantic fumbling for wands.

In Sextus, a tall, dark haired man in his thirties, there was still something more than his name that was reminiscent of his Luperci ancestors who, in the Rome Caesar would have called ancient, had kept the seven hills clear of both werewolves and their more mundane cousins: a sort of intrepid composure, and a sense of irony that could carry off wearing a wolf skin cloak as he hunted a pack. But this descendant of eagles was long since domesticated and in his lifetime had dealt with no problems more serious than a werewolf complaining of too little or too much sugar in his morning cup of tea. His wife was of a different brand: less phlegmatic and more adventurous, with more intellect and less cunning, she was better suited to the pursuit of dark wizards than the hunting of rabid beasts. The result was that, in pelting down the stairs, patched pyjama pants flapping, the couple allowed the spectre to precede, them, this translucent gentleman in stiff, stuffy clothes who bowed to all comers and made excessive use of the word 'sir' having in his time put down riots and pursued canine fugitives through city streets and dense undergrowth, and hopefully would know what to do. In better times, there would have been staff to assist: besides the family, at least one properly trained medical man, several stout boys with wands and at least preliminary training, as many witches as the current lady of the house found necessary to keep domestic affairs in order, and a fluctuating number of devoted house elves. Now there were only these three: two inexperienced and one stone dead, in a pitiful mockery of the battles with escaped wolves of the past.

They reached the vault and were delayed at the door; the key remained in the lock these days but Remus, to give warning of an impending adult invasion, had pulled the heavy door shut behind him. Further scrabbling occurred, hands with opposable thumbs not being less clumsy than wolf's paws when impeded by panic, and then they were inside, wands pointed as if for a duel, eyes wide and breathing laboured; to the people the atmosphere was tense, and the wolves, both in enclosures and out of them, could smell the fear in the air.

Miss Yorke lay by her prey, idly worrying at a bloody leg. Dragged or in flight, Remus had been transferred from the corner of a cell to the centre of the floor and there collapsed or been flung down, his arms still wrapped clumsily about his face and throat. These were certainly scratched and probably bitten; certainly she'd had both his legs between her teeth, and there were bloodstained rents in his shirt that might have indicated some damage to the torso, but from where they stood, any reasonable assessment of the child's injuries was impossible. Her age very probably saved his life. This wasn't an exuberant pup determined to work off excessive energy by mauling anything and everything softer than a brick wall, nor yet a robust adult with personal status to maintain; she was an old matriarch of a pack she had never had and, while in her frustration she had been eager to inflict as much damage as possible, her energy had been quickly spent and now she was content to merely gnaw relatively gently at the boy with her loose, blunted teeth in a proprietary fashion, growling deep in her throat at the interruption while, trapped behind the thankfully more sturdy doors, her wolfish companions followed events by scent and sound, and raised hue and cry like an impatient audience.

At the sight of her injured child, Charlotte forgot her wand and, grabbing an old silver spear from the wall, lunged at the wolf. Marcus dived after her, shouting, and, while his discorporate arms, of course, failed to restrain her, the shock of a spirit passing through her body at least caused her to stumble and fall aside. Relying entirely on textbook instinct, Sextus cried aloud and a stream of light shot from his wand and struck the wolf, who had scrambled to her feet, baring red streaked fangs, sending her hurtling against the wall with a _crack_ of breaking bones.

Quiet and pale and still, wolf and child were carried upstairs. Both were sorry in the morning.

Frail Miss Yorke was, superficially, the most badly injured of the two. Bones that, translated into human form, were situated in the legs and arms were broken in several places and she had suffered a mild concussion. Worse, they hadn't dared to bring her out of the cellar without binding her, even injured as she was, and in the throes of the transformation the constriction of the cords had caused her limbs to contort and the ends of the bones to pierce her wrinkled flesh. She lay, remorseful over something she had no memory of, on her bed, whimpering and apologising, and attended by Charlotte, whose stiff, jerky movements and grim expression belied her assurances that "of course no one could blame you, Agauë, it was an accident."

Remus looked worse than he was. His arms were scratched, yes, and there was the nasty blow to the head that had knocked him senseless, but he might have received worse injuries falling out of a tree, and apart from a shallow gash on his shoulder and a couple of admittedly messy wounds on his legs he was relatively unscathed. Certainly far better off than the stories of those who had survived encounters with werewolves would have had you believe. But there was that torn flesh on his legs, punctured by teeth, _toyed_ with by teeth, and though they'd cleaned the wounds thoroughly he had suffered prolonged exposure to the infected saliva of the beast.

Of course, there was still hope. Not every case of contamination ended with the victim being himself infected. There were mysterious immunities, and the disease had been proven to be less evident in the saliva of an elderly wolf than in a youthful one. Some people, like antique Muggle consumptives, were infected with the disease and yet never suffered a transformation, enduring no worse inconvenience than making sure not to kiss or spit on the night of the full moon; there was an 18th century case in which a child had mysteriously contracted lycanthropy; it had later been proven that her uncle, who had made much of the child on a visit shown to have taken place on the full moon, had unknown to himself been bitten by a werewolf as a small boy.

But these instances were few and far between, and the whole household, husband and wife and fast recovering child, ghost and wolves waited for the month long incubation period to pass, with their eyes fixed ever more carefully on the phases of the moon.

A hundred years ago it would have been accepted as a risk of the profession; the family prided itself on the minimal number of werewolf bites its scions had received, but these things happened, and the unfortunate boy would have been mourned like one dead and then quietly shut away. Nowadays, being stripped of their official capacity, there was no less stigma attached to a wolf keeper receiving a bite than any other careless wizard; more so, perhaps, as they were perceived as having purposefully placed themselves in the way of peril.

Marcus, to whom the past century was a lamentable mistake best forgotten about, took the ancient view and consoled his descendant with stories of other keepers, or even older ones of hunters, who had become afflicted in the course of performing their duties. One of his own sons, bearing the unfortunate name of Fenrir, had been bitten in the same riot that had killed his father and spent the rest of his days in the institution he should have inherited the running of. Such people were useful in the capacity of go betweens, between staff and inmates, and even now, with their traditional profession decaying behind them, Remus was in a unique position to understand the disease.

Sextus, who spent his life regretting having turned down an offer of the position of Hogwarts' Potions Master in order to run the family business retreated to his laboratory, a vague ambition to one day find and patent a cure for lycanthropy suddenly coming into focus, and Charlotte looked with growing disapproval on a situation she had never given thought to, before: the amount of time her son spent with the werewolves.

As for Remus, he endured the situation with the disconcerting calm of precocious, solitary children, quietly playing or paging through old books, eyes taking in the polysyllabic words in the more esoteric with the half comprehending patience of one to whom learning comes easily. Oblivious to his mother's ire, he trailed after the werewolves more than ever. Since the Incident, Miss Yorke had become Agauë, the name being tragically apropos, though he didn't understand it when she quoted Euripides to him: 'There is a strange tyranny in the god who sent against your house this cruel punishment.'

Only once did he bring up the subject of his injury of his own volition, and that addressed to Mr Crawford, the werewolf who wheezed, in the oddly formal, Dickensian inflection of a child who has acquired his ideas of conversation from the example of Pip and Herbert, Muggle werewolves having brought with them, over the years, an extraordinary collection of books that lingered now in the old library to be puzzled over by incredulous wizarding children.

"Well, sir," he said. "I didn't do it properly, did I?"

"How d'you mean?" huffed out the old man.

"When you break rules, you have to make sure you don't get caught, not by anybody, or else you deserve to pay the price. I mean to say," and Remus grinned with a subtle impertinence that, two decades later, would be the kindly, ironical smile of a man who saw the humour in everything as a survival mechanism, "if I decide to sit up in a vampire's tomb, I'm going to take some garlic with me; I've learned my lesson."

By the time the moon was waxing full again extensive repairs had been made, at the great expense, to the heavy iron doors in the underground cells. More candles had been lit, and the cobwebs magiced away, in an endeavour to disguise the eeriness of the place for the child's second visit. Still, this time four people instead of three trudged down the old stairs, four doors were shut and locked and barred and tested, and parents waited with baited breath until their questions were answered: for the second time in two months, a child's scream cut the air.


End file.
